The strange world of news satire

Who says there's nothing funny about the news? Its reputation for offering nothing but a depressing view of the world hasn't harmed the careers of a swag of satirists—who use the news as the starting point for their material.

Transcript

Gerald Tooth: It was the fool in Shakespeare's King Lear who was charged with the responsibility of telling the doomed King the truth and abolishing myths.

It could be argued that the growing number of entertainment programs based on satirising the news fit into that Shakespearean tradition; or perhaps not, if this recent press conference with Attorney-General Philip Ruddock is anything to go by.

[Excerpt of ABC TV's Chaser's War on Everything]

Julian Morrow: Minister, you've outlined the government's counter-terrorism strategy this morning, but can I ask you, in entertainment what is Austin Powers' middle name?

Philip Ruddock: Who is Austin Powers?

Julian Morrow: Well it does bear on your portfolio, Minister, Austin Powers is a super-spy?

Philip Ruddock: Is he; for whom?

Julian Morrow: The British government I believe.

Philip Ruddock: I see. I don't ever know the names of spies, and I certainly don't know the names of intelligence officers, nor should you.

Julian Morrow: Okay so I shouldn't tell you that the answer is in fact Danger is his middle name...

Philip Ruddock: No, you shouldn't tell me the names that may be a nom de plume of agents when you may expose their lives to danger.

Gerald Tooth: That was comedian Julian Morrow from ABC Television's The Chaser's War on Everything, stretching Attorney-General Philip Ruddock's knowledge of popular culture to breaking point. And he joins us now from our Sydney studio.

Julian Morrow, welcome to ABC Radio National's Media Report.

Julian Morrow: Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Gerald Tooth: The question we want to ask you, is there anything inherently funny about the news as it is before you blokes get a hold of it?

Julian Morrow: Absolutely. I think most people are very cynical about the state of affairs, and in particular, politics, and a lot of the time it doesn't require our assistance to make people laugh at it, or at least think that it's laughable. Thankfully there's a little bit of space left over where we can try and push them along in that direction a little bit further.

Gerald Tooth: Yet The Chaser goes out to make their own news and sabotage the news as it's presented, and involve themselves in news events. Why did you decide to do that in the first place?

Julian Morrow: Well don't think that's an accurate characterisation of what we do. We certainly don't try to sabotage news events, and in the way we make our television, we're actually, strange as this may seem, really quite respectful of the ordinary news processes.

Gerald Tooth: But would passing food into Kim Beazley in the middle of a press conference be respectful of...?

Julian Morrow: OK, that's an example of, yes, that is in fact an example of that, even though you may not believe it. That was a press conference, a doorstop during the 2001 election campaign, and Beazley gave a doorstep at a petrol station which ran for about probably 10 or 15 minutes. We gave all the lead journos there the chance to ask their, or the questions which they regard as serious, although not necessarily everyone would agree with that, beforehand. We then did our incursions which in that case were actually three stages, so they did I suppose disrupt the news conference, but I would say that they disrupted the news conference in the same way that News Limited asking a question disrupts Fairfax's press conference.

I mean in the end everyone's out there trying to get their bit, and that was another example of where we actually gave people news. We don't seek to have our efforts publicised anywhere other than on our show, it's just often that the news hungry bastards in other media get to it first and steal our thunder.

Gerald Tooth: And I know there are journalists in the press gallery in Canberra that actually look towards you for a bit of fun in the middle of those boring campaigns.

Julian Morrow: Yes, some love us and some hate us. There's a bit of a kind of a feel that goes around when we turn up at a press conference, and as I say, we do actually take care to not completely hijack things, except when we need to. We reserve the right to, I suppose.

Gerald Tooth: I'm very surprised at the respectful way that you're responding to this, and the respectful way that you treat the news process itself.

Julian Morrow: Well, yes. I suppose the reason is that as a professional courtesy I understand everyone's got their job to do, and my job's different from a news journalist's job. To some extent we make their job easier, because we might provide them with an angle. But I also think that to do our job, I mean this is where I suppose I should immediately step down from any sort of pretence of principle and reveal that it is in fact just self interest dressed up, like most things. To do our job, we need to be able to not be regarded as arrant pests by everyone, we need to get information from people, and if we just ran around like nihilistic, solipsistic idiots, it would be much harder for us to do our job, because we rely on information from other people as well.

Gerald Tooth: Well that self-interest you're talking about, I mean the news, the serious news, is the foundation that you build on, and without that there's no architecture to go on with I suppose.

Julian Morrow: Yes, well that's the case. We do stuff which is not at all satirical and is just purely comedic, and we occasionally use real-life news events, as, if you like, the stage for that. But we could make comedy that didn't engage with the real world at all, we just happen to think that it's more fun, probably has a worthwhile point to it, although it's not the only or necessarily best way of making comedy, but yes, we think it's worthwhile and worth doing, and we actually think that it taps into a general perception in the population I suppose, I shouldn't say 'general', thinking about our ratings, but a perception that politics is actually something that is often, arguably always, worthy of ridicule.

Gerald Tooth: Now you spoke a little earlier about the buzz that goes around when you turn up at a press conference; since the launch of your show this year, The Chaser's War on Everything, have you to some extent become victims of your own success? Does the recognition that you have make your job harder?

Julian Morrow: Yes, to some extent. We find it harder to get into press conferences these days, certainly I'm pretty sure that there's a reasonably fat, ASIO file or Federal Police file that has 'Chaser' marked on it, because the police seem to be reasonably aware of our presence on a regular basis, and we often find ourselves spending more time talking to Federal police than we do federal politicians, which is unfortunate, although some of them are more interesting. Yes, so it does make it more difficult, but like anything, it creates its own opportunities and challenges as well. It also means that people are maybe less threatened by what we do; they kind of know what it is now, and some of them are even willing to play along.

Gerald Tooth: I'm interested in the fact that you say you have numerous conversations with the Federal Police; what sort of things are they coming to talk to you about?

Julian Morrow: Ah well, the Prime Minister has a Protective Services attaché with him at all times, and whenever we turn up in anticipation of a Prime Ministerial press conference, they essentially run interference, and if we try and approach the Prime Minister, they'll just push us out of the way. They have absolutely, I would say, no right nor basis to do that, but they do.

Gerald Tooth: That is quite extraordinary. Do you think some of the other hostility that the media might show towards you is that The Chaser's War on Everything have set themselves up as an alternative Media Watch. I note the front of your website asking people to not go to Media Watch but come to you, because you'll offer a better way of revenge.

Julian Morrow: I don't think we say 'better'; don't we actually say that it'll be much more substantial and intellectually serious if you do it with Media Watch, but if you just want to do it in a ridiculous, pissy way, you can come to us.

Gerald Tooth: And get your revenge.

Julian Morrow: Yes, exactly. An offer that not many people have taken up now that I think of it, but well look, I mean we're an alternative but we're not on some sort of high horse saying that we're the only legitimate form of media, we just do things our way and we think that that's legitimate without necessarily saying that others aren't.

Gerald Tooth: And one of those things that you do do, is a segment called 'What We've Learned from Current Affairs'.

Julian Morrow: That's right.

Gerald Tooth: Are those words together simply an oxymoron?

Julian Morrow: That's more or less a good summary of the segment. Yes, we do a weekly segment called 'What Have We Learned from Current Affairs This Week', the answer to which is always nothing, and essentially two of our Chaser guys have become, for their sins, they watch Today Tonight, and A Current Affair each day, and essentially make observations about the way those shows are put together, and we do it in a comedic way, in the same way that say, someone like David Marr or Stuart Littlemore when they were doing Media Watch, were often the funniest thing on television. So yes, we're purporting to do a bit of comment there, but we always work on the assumption that we're also complete hypocrites and that eventually someone else will nail us, and when they do I suppose, if only for logical consistency, we'll have to say Oh, well, that's a fair cop.

[Excerpt of ABC TV's Chaser's War on Everything]

Gerald Tooth: Those two Chaser members that are forced to watch those programs every week, have you noticed any change in their personality, or perhaps their vocabulary?

Julian Morrow: What I would say is that they had I think, medically recognised defects that drew them to the task of watching those shows, in advance. They seem to have even less respect for some of the journalists than they started out with, which is quite an achievement. Their vocabulary is not changing that much other than with the inevitable ravages of old age that are encompassing us all, but they know all the tricks of the trade now, so I personally think that they're using that segment as an audition piece to get drafted by one of the shows.

Gerald Tooth: And reading your own biography, I mean that's how you got into the media, after apparently an appearance on Hey, Hey, It's Saturday's 'Red Faces' that Channel Nine offered you a job on A Current Affair.

Julian Morrow: That's right, yes. Well they immediately spotted that what I was trying to do wasn't actually very funny but would pass as current affairs, and the natural home for that is of course A Current Affair, although I must say one of the things that the guys have commented on is that they generally think that the standards are better on A Current Affair than on Today Tonight. Now it's not exactly, I mean no-one's nominating them for a Walkely, but it does appear that the real bottom of the barrel is Today Tonight.

Gerald Tooth: Do you think there's a need for what you do? What do people say to you, what sort of response do you get? Do people rely on having the seriousness of the News agenda given some levity by what you guys do?

Julian Morrow: I mean there's certainly a need for what we do from a personal perspective, because otherwise I'd be a lawyer. But I don't make any great claims about the importance of what we do, I would say, and it's only anecdotal observation, that there seem to be people who are relieved by the sort of attitude that we bring to serious matters like politics and who find it engaging, and also find I suppose the implied criticisms and views that come out of some of the stuff that we do, they find that that accords with their own views. I'm not 100% sure that we do anything other than preach to the converted, but it's good to have an audience, even if they're already converts.

Gerald Tooth: Julian Morrow thank you very much for joining us on Radio National's Media Report.

Julian Morrow: It's a pleasure.

Gerald Tooth: Julian Morrow one of the Chaser team from ABC television's War on Everything, which you can catch on Friday nights.

Now to a comedic performance that, despite not being seen as funny at the time, is refusing to go away.

In the United States, Stephen Colbert has a regular television spot as a satirical right-wing commentator. In April he was invited to do his routine at the prestigious White House Correspondents' Dinner, in the presence of President George W. Bush.

It went over like the proverbial lead balloon at the function, but ever since, tape of Colbert's speech has been breaking download records on the internet.

An Audio version went to Number One on Apple I-Tunes and non-profit cable network, C-Span, who filmed the speech, took the unusual step of charging for downloads of the video because of the overwhelming interest, which has continued to grow.

Here now is part of Stephen Colbert's performance.

Stephen Colbert: As excited as I am to be here with the President, I am appalled to be surrounded by the Liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the President's side and the Vice President's side. But the rest of you, what are you thinking? Reporting on NSA wire-tapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason; they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished.

Over the last five years you people were so good over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the effect of global warming, we Americans didn't want to know and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we know.

But listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions, he's the decider, the press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down, make, announce, type. Just put them through a spellcheck and go home. Get to know your family again, make love to your wife, write that novel you've got kicking around in your head, you know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the Administration? You know, fiction.

Gerald Tooth: American comedian, Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' dinner in April.

Another American comedian who uses news and current affairs as the fodder to feet his imagination, is Andy Borowitz. He's the author of The Borowitz Report, satirical news items that closely follow current events and personalities, which he posts on the internet.

The Media Report caught up with Andy Borowitz when he was recently in Australia for the Sydney Writers Week, and I began by asking him about the growing number of news satirists in the United States.

Andy Borowitz: In addition to me, we have some other pretty well known practitioners, Jon Stewart, I guess you get The Daily Show over here, so I'm led to understand; and we have something called The Onion, which I don't know if that's been popular here, but that's sort of in the same genre of what I'm doing, which is fake news. I produce a lot of fake news stories, sort of like what your Rupert Murdoch does I guess, so it's sort of in that genre as well.

Gerald Tooth: Well the Borowitz Report is where that appears, and look, that's an online service, and when you talk about The Onion, we get that online. Online seems to have become a wonderful world for political satire.

Andy Borowitz: Well my site is borowitzreport.com or also andyborowitz.com you can get to it, and what's great about online is that you can react so quickly to events. I remember, you probably heard this little news story that happened a couple of months ago when our Vice President went hunting and shot a fellow in the face, that probably made it to these shores I would guess, and I heard about that on a Sunday, around four in the afternoon, and by six that evening, I already had a story up on the website about it. So the sort of traditional time delay of producing a satirical TV show or writing for a satirical magazine like The National Lampoon, that just evaporates on the internet, you can just have an instant strike, which I think is what makes it so much fun.

Gerald Tooth: Is there a danger though, of confusing fake news with real news? And more and more young Americans are getting their news through the window of satire now, aren't they?

Andy Borowitz: That is true. I think there's zero danger, because first of all what's happened with young people, and I go to a lot of college campuses, I've heard this, some of them said, Well I was watching The Daily Show, I was watching Jon Stewart and I thought the show was really funny, but I didn't get all the jokes. And so that made me actually seek out real news, I started watching CNN and I started reading the newspapers, so I actually think fake news in its own way educated the audience and makes them want to know what's the joke about? So I think most people know the difference between real news and fake news.

Actually I think one thing about fake news in places like The Onion or the Borowitz Report, is at least we come out and say it's fake. You know, if you read in The New York Times, The New York Times a couple of weeks ago had a front page story, this is on page 1, where they said that Airbus was designing new airplanes; we were going to have standing room where you'd actually be strapped to the wall, and they showed diagrams of how this was going to work out and everything. And then about a day later they published a retraction saying the story was a hoax, that a freelancer had written this and nobody I guess bothered to check whether or not this story had any plausibility issues whatsoever.

So at least if you read the Borowitz Report and it said we were strapping people - and we did do a story about how passengers were going to be stored in the overhead bins for example, but people who read The Borowitz Report know that it's fake news; people who read The New York Times actually think what they're getting is real news.

Gerald Tooth: What about US tabloids like The National Inquirer and the Weekly World News, they're out there in that world as well, doing the same sort of job.

Andy Borowitz: Well the Weekly World News is really I've got to say, a humour publication, because they go out of their way to be funny. I think one of my favourite stories they ever did was they had a story about a baby who was born with a peg-leg, a wooden peg-leg, and my favourite thing was the sub-headline was 'Peg-leg like that of an 18th century pirate, experts say'. Now I'm trying to think of what expert that would be: an expert in new-born wooden peg-legs? I just was astounded by that. So they actually go out of their way to be funny.

The National Inquirer on the other hand, really tries to do reporting, and what's interesting with The National Inquirer is that they're often accurate. I mean during the OJ Simpson case for example, almost every time that they came out with some revelation before the rest of the news media, they turned out to be correct, and it's interesting that publications, some of these really sort of disgraced publications like The National Inquirer or The Star in America, actually do a pretty good job of reporting. They're at least not saying that passengers are going to be strapped to the wall of an Airbus, they're not coming out with that.

Gerald Tooth: Now another thing that we were really interested in, if we're talking about the power of the net, is Stephen Colbert. His speech, or presentation to the White House Correspondents Association dinner, went down like a stone at the dinner, but took off on the internet, and C-Span actually started selling the video of that. Again it shows the power of satire, political satire, in America and the hunger for it.

Andy Borowitz: Well it also says a lot about how context is so important for comedy, because I don't know if Stephen Colbert's show has made it over here yet, but what he is doing is, he's doing a parody of a right-wing TV cable pundit, sort of like this guy Bill O'Reilly who we have in America, who's on Fox News, which is Rupert's service in America. So every night he does this dead-on parody of a right-wing pundit where everything he says in praise of the president is at the same time totally damning of the President, because it's coming from the mouth of an idiot. So at that particular dinner in Washington, I don't imagine there was a single person in the audience who was hip enough to have ever seen the Stephen Colbert show.

So they just thought this is a guy who's going up there saying incredibly rude things about the President, and so of course it went from being comedy to being a kind of performance art as the room sort of emptied of laughter. But on the internet, Stephen Colbert's fans are capable of downloading it into their iPods, I mean people can download and then listen to it on their iPods, and so the great thing about the internet is that if you're doing something and there's an audience for it, people can find it, people will send the links to friends.

My site started as something I was just doing for friends, and to entertain myself, and it was originally, you know, at any given time there were three or four people visiting the Borowitz Report, and now we send out emails to half a million people every day around the world, including in Australia. So the internet enables you to build an audience which wouldn't be there otherwise.

Gerald Tooth: Do you think you're posing a threat to Rupert Murdoch?

Andy Borowitz: Well Rupert Murdoch is always going to be stronger in the comedy area than I will; there's no way I could ever compete with Rupert. I'll give you an example: we have The New York Post, in New York, which is Rupert's tabloid there, and his headlines are like, I think they're almost like haiku, they're just beautiful, they're elegant, they're poetic, and one of my favourites was after the Americans invaded Afghanistan and they were dropping bombs on Kabul. The headline - do you have any idea what the headline in The New York Post was?

Gerald Tooth: No, I don't.

Andy Borowitz: It would be 'Kabul'seye'. Now again, I just think clever and tasteful. It's really hard to compete with somebody like Rupert Murdoch when it comes to that.

Gerald Tooth: And Rupert's press in England has a long tradition of those sorts of headlines in their tabloids, which brings me to the BBC. And the BBC recently, accidentally, interviewed a cab driver instead of an IT expert. I mean they were venturing into the world of comedy there; do you admire that?

Andy Borowitz: They actually interviewed a cab driver? How does that happen?

Gerald Tooth: I think he was the cab driver and he had the same first name as their guest that the cab driver had in fact driven to the studio, and he was ushered into a studio and interviewed live on air for a minute or so before they realised their dreadful mistake.

Andy Borowitz: Well these accidents can happen. For example, I don't know if you heard about this, but in my country, we were supposed to invade a country that had weapons of mass destruction and we invaded Iraq instead of Iran, so that was sort of a typographical error, so these things do happen all the time, you've just got to give people a free pass on that I think.

Gerald Tooth: And the consequences are obviously something to laugh about, as far as you're concerned.

Andy Borowitz: Well I don't know. It's better than the alternative which is just crying, or hurling yourself from a building, I think. I think in general you know, I do get that a lot of people say you know, I'm so depressed by the news, at least your version makes me laugh instead of wanting to kill myself. So if I'm providing that public service, that's OK.

Gerald Tooth: The US of course is the capital of rolling 24-hour news channels. Now that need to fill up all of that time with content, does that make them the perfect target for satirists like you?

Andy Borowitz: I think it does, because it certainly gives you more to work with. I mean the fact that they're relentlessly trying to come up with news. And you know, we have something in America called sweeps, I don't know if you have them in Australia, where the ratings are all determined by what happens during these sweeps periods. So these are the periods where CNN and Fox like to specialise in stories like people being attacked by sharks, very, very important, that happens a lot during the sweeps months; or attractive white women disappearing.

That's the other thing, a white woman who suddenly disappears. And I guess people are pretty much safe from sharks or white women really pretty much don't disappear the rest of the year, but during sweeps week, they suddenly do. So it does become something, they sort of make themselves laughable in a way, and they are on and off a lot. When you're on 24 hours a day, it's like anything: if you had a camera on you 24 hours a day, you'd slip up all the time, you know, so they're kind of making themselves targets by virtue of the sort of gauntlet that they're running themselves through.

Gerald Tooth: Well to move from those that are in the bright lights all the time, to those that are in the darkness. In reading The Borowitz Report, you've managed to get a hold of the blog of Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea; now how did you get hold of that in the first place?

Andy Borowitz: This is actually only in The Borowitz Report book, which is, I should hasten to add, available in Australia. It's The Borowitz Report - The Big Book of Shockers, and it was a collection of about 100 of my columns from the Borowitz Report, and I wanted to have some unifying thematic material, and I thought, Who would be better to tie this all together than Kim Jong Il, because I'm a big fan of Kim Jong Il's work, first of all. As mad men go, I think he's probably the maddest, and I just thought, you know, He's very reclusive, but I just thought I would send him an email and see what he said, and it turns out he was totally thrilled to do it; he has a lot of time on his hands. He spends a lot of his time reprocessing fuel rods, but that doesn't take up your whole day. That leaves you plenty of time left as a blogger. So he shares all these great segments of his blog with us, and we learn a lot about the real Kim Jong Il in the book.

Gerald Tooth: And he's incredibly plugged in to American politics and American celebrity as well.

Andy Borowitz: Pop culture, definitely, he raps a little in the book, which really surprised me, I had no idea he was into hip-hop, and he lists his desert island discs; he's a much cooler guy than any of us ever imagined.

Gerald Tooth: Well to move from him to another world leader, and that's of course George W. Bush, your president; are you a little fearful now that his popularity has dropped in the polls so much, that he's not going to be around long enough for you to continue this work? I mean he's been a great source of inspiration for you.

Andy Borowitz: Well you know, he is now, his popularity is at I think 29%, which just to keep that in some perspective, he is now actually less popular than bird flu, this is true, like recent polls have shown that Americans think that bird flu is doing a better job as a pandemic than he is doing as President. So he's not going to be around for much longer, although we had this - this is a little different from Australia, we have a law that says you can only be president for eight years anyway. That's also true of some, I guess, American celebrity marriages, as well, there's a time limit on those as well.

Gerald Tooth: Is it as long as eight years?

Andy Borowitz: No, actually it's eight months, it's a little different, but it is in the US Constitution that two celebrities can't be married for longer than eight months. I think if you understand that law, our pop culture probably makes so much more sense. You probably weren't aware that that was even a law.

Gerald Tooth: Had no idea.

Andy Borowitz: But no, he's going to be gone; he'll be gone but you know, there's always somebody on the horizon that's going to be better, and plus there are all these other people that present themselves as targets, for example, this guy the President of Iran, he's good for a nutty pronouncement about once a week. According to their law he can be around for the next 80 years, so I think he's not going anywhere. But he's a good one. And then there are just always people on the American political scene; we may have Hillary Clinton, she may be running for the White House, that could be kind of interesting. I think Bill Clinton would love to be back in the White House, because those were some good times for him, as I recall, and that was a great time for him. So I think he'll be happy to be back there.

Gerald Tooth: Andy Borowitz, before we go any further and get ourselves into enormous amounts of trouble, thank you very much for joining us on ABC Radio National's Media Report.

Andy Borowitz: Thanks for having me.

Gerald Tooth: Comedian Andy Borowitz, author of The Big Book of Shockers, and Who Moved My Soap? both published by Simon and Schuster.

And that's the program for this week. Thanks to the production team of Andrew Davies and Jim Ussher, and to Sabrina Lipovic at ABC Archives.

And I hope you can join us next week when we take a look at the media in Afghanistan as Australian troops return to the troubled country.